Description

Students talk about qualities that make a good friend and brainstorm ways to be good friends and uphold promises in an interactive way.

Supplies

• Paper
• Pencils
• Crayons
• Printable handprint outline (optional)
• White board or large piece of paper
• Dry erase marker (for whiteboard) or regular marker (for paper)

How to Play

1. Start a discussion with the group about what it means to be a good friend. Have them think of some of their friends and why they like them. Challenge the group to think of things other than the physical attributes of their friends and to think more about specific actions they do or personality traits that their friends have.
2. As a group, create a list of all the promises you could make to be a good friend. Write them down on a whiteboard or a large piece of paper at the front so students can refer to them.
3. Have each student trace their hand on a piece of paper and use a crayon to write their name in the middle (palm of the hand). Or, use the handprint templates from the Downloads and Links section below.
4. Tell the students that today we are going to be making five promises to our friends. We’ll also be making a visual to help remind us to uphold those promises.
5. In the middle of the hand, underneath where the student wrote their name, have them write “promises” to show that they are making five promises to try and be a good friend to others.
6. In each of the fingers, have students decide which five promises from the larger list they would like to make and write one in each finger.
7. Remind the group that each person’s hand might look different and that’s ok! We all have different things that we value or want to be as a friend, so some things might be the same and some things might be different.
8. Allow students to then decorate their hands however they like.
9. Have students share what they wrote in their hands and how they plan to make sure they uphold their promises.
10. Encourage students to go home and hang their five promises in their room as a reminder and to share it with other friends/siblings so that they can try to uphold promises too!

Activity Prompts for Reflection

• Would anyone like to praise someone in our group who is a good friend?
• What does that person do that makes them a good friend?
• Can someone share a time they upheld one of the promises they wrote on their hand?
• What is something you can do if you see someone who is not being a good friend?
• How does it make you feel when someone is a good friend to you?
• How does it make you feel when you know you are being a good friend to someone else?

Other Ways to Play

• Pair students together at the beginning to make tracing their hands easier. Have one student hold the paper and the other student trace the hand.
• Have an adult-sized hand already traced on paper so students have more room to write their promises (or use the templates in the Downloads and Links section below.)
• Buy small stickers or stamps to allow students to decorate their hands once finished writing.
• Help students relate to good friends that they’ve seen in movies or television shows or read about in books and have them draw them on the back of their hands.
• Have the students list all of their friends on the back of their hands.
• For younger students just beginning to learn to write, come up with a list together and then have them draw a picture of being a good friend in the middle of the hand.

Additional Notes

• Use the SEL Activity Prompts to tie other SEL competencies to this activity.
• Visual aid of activity adapted from https://adorethem.com/what-makes-a-good-friend

Downloads and Links

Handprint Templates